Publishing Executive magazine featured Des Moines as a “City Spotlight” in its August issue.

The article, titled “Fertile Ground for Publishing,” lays out the benefits of doing business in the city, from the Forbes rankings to the low unemployment rate, and how that has related to the publishing industry.

“The Midwest may be renowned for its slower pace of life, but one shouldn’t confuse that for apathy,” writes the author, Gretchen Peck. “All of these Des Moines publishing houses reflect the local culture: Say ‘no’ to status quo. They’re thirsty for knowledge and innovation.”

The article quotes a number of local industry professionals, including Janette Larkin, publisher of Business Publications Corporation Inc., and Art Slusark, vice president of corporate communications and government relations at Meredith Corp.

Publishers deploy low-tech and high-tech content to engage kids and get them invested in reading.

By Gretchen A. Peck

Though the very word “interactivity” conjures images of electronic gadgets, things to swipe, and other bells and whistles, it isn’t a new concept for children’s books. Publishers have been designing interactive content for quite a long time.

“There have been-literally, across centuries-any number of books that could be considered interactive,” says Christopher Franceschelli, president and publisher of Brooklyn-based Handprint Books. “There were books with pop-up elements dating back to the 16th Century, and an extensive pop-up industry in Germany in the 19th Century. There was a renaissance for those here in the States during the 1960s and 1970s. And we’ve had sticker books, books with die-cut elements, scratch-and-sniff books, and holographic inserts. If you can think of it, it already exists, so there has been a long tradition of interactive books, long before the first ebook was ever contemplated.”

Publishers understand the need to diversify, and there are plenty of smart channels in which to extend editorial brands, including live and virtual events. Events have the potential to unlock new revenue, solidify audience engagement, and bolster advertisers’ integrated marketing campaigns.

But hosting events is risky business. A poorly attended one can quickly put a dent in an otherwise healthy P&L. One marred by poor planning can damage a publication’s brand or turn off event sponsors. Logistically speaking, events are complicated to plan, market, and execute.

It used to be that one could look at an organizational chart for a newspaper and find roles and responsibilities neatly divided into categories that made perfect sense: Editorial, Advertising, Production, Business. And the people who made the newspaper miraculously appear every day on the newsstand, in the mailbox, or the front porch? They had easy-to-understand titles, too, like reporter, editor, circulation manager, publisher, and ad sales.

A lot of those titles still exist and remain vital to producing a newspaper. But the organizational chart is beginning to morph, pulled and stretched in new directions by economics, consumer preferences, technology, and a timely collision of new media and old media.

Like seemingly every other magazine category, teen and young-adult titles have taken a beating in the past decade, with consolidation and the print advertising downward spiral forcing the closure of renowned brands — 16, YM, Teen, Teen Beat, Teen People, just to name a few. As retailers cowered or went dark across the nation, print magazines lost some of their best distribution allies-especially teen titles, many of which rely on those single-copy sales.

Publishing Executive asked publishers and editors about the challenges of publishing for this audience-to print, the web, and mobile devices-and how they’ve been able to compel young readers to love to read magazines. While the content in this category runs the gamut from celebrity insights to science and technology, there are some important commonalities among this target demographic: This generation of young readers is smart, articulate — opinionated even — and tethered to their smartphones.